the patriarchal and patrilineal nature of the invading culture, in contrast
with the apparently egalitarian and matrilineal culture of the invaded.
Archaeology
J. P. Mallory, dating the migrations to c. 4,000 BCE, and putting less
insistence on their violent or quasi-military nature, essentially modified
Gimbutas' theory making it compatible with a less gender-political
narrative. David Anthony, focusing mostly on the evidence for the
domestication of horses and the presence of wheeled vehicles, came to
regard specifically the Yamna culture, which replaced the Sredny Stog
culture around 3,500 BCE, as the most likely candidate for the Proto-
Indo-European speech community.[2]
Anthony describes the spread of cattle-raising from early farmers in the
Danube Valley into the Ukrainian steppes in the 6th–5th millennium
BCE, forming a cultural border with the hunter-gatherers[2] whose
languages may have included archaic PIE.[2] Anthony notes that
domesticated cattle and sheep probably didn't enter the steppes from
the Transcaucasia, since the early farming communities there were not
widespread, and separated from the steppes by the
glaciated Caucasus.[2] Subsequent cultures developed in this area which
adopted cattle, most notably the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture.[2]
Asko Parpola regards the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture as the birthplace of
wheeled vehicles, and therefore as the homeland for Late PIE, assuming
that Early PIE was spoken by Skelya pastoralists (early Sredny Stog
culture[2]) who took over the Tripillia culture at c. 4,300–4,000
BCE.[47] On its eastern border lay the Sredny Stog culture (4400– 3400
BCE),[2] whose origins are related to "people from the east, perhaps
from the Volga steppes".[2] It plays a central role in Gimbutas' Kurgan
hypothesis,[2] and coincides with the spread of early PIE across the
steppes[2] and into the Danube valley (c. 4,000 BCE),[2] leading to the